Hacker News Reader

Comment by norikki | Hacker News Reader

Black Americans are constantly being held back by leftists like on this school board denying them a real education. Being an 'AAVE' speaker severely limits your economic opportunity. Black Americans need to fully integrate, and academics need to stop justifying the existence of a culture that attacks anyone who makes something of themselves as an 'Uncle Tom'.

The linguistics here are fascinating, but telling young black Americans that they can talk like hoodlums and expect to get ahead in life is cruel. Think of these children's futures. The way they talk is not an endangered species that needs to be preserved in the wild, it is a hindrance to real people trying to improve their lives; which should be the only purpose of public schools, not anthropology.

View on HN

Race war trolling—including race war concern trolling—is not welcome on Hacker News.

We've noticed an uptick in this kind of thing lately, and no, you can't do it here.

"Being an 'AAVE' speaker severely limits your economic opportunity" is an extraordinary claim for which you have provided no evidence whatsoever.

A claim that is easy to generate evidence for, because it is true, is that being black severely limits your economic opportunity. That, of course, is a boring claim; numerous studies have demonstrated the discrimination black people endure based simply on their names. Should they, in the interests of "fully integrating", change those as well?

This comment was written in response to a poorly argued comment that has now, with the introduction of "talk like hoodlums", been edited into something worse.

We may soon have the technology to alter the DNA of embryos. I wonder if parent commenter would argue that blacks should choose to have white-colored children. The same argument works. It objectively gives them a better chance in life, and not doing it hurts their chances.

But is there anyone that isn't made extremely uncomfortable by that possibility? Yet the logic is exactly the same. How is changing your skin color to fit in, any different than changing your language?

I think there is a cruel logic to parent commenters point. He's absolutely correct, teaching the kids to "speak white" would probably make them better off. At least in terms of statistical outcomes. But the suggestion just seems so wrong and offensive. In the same way as telling them to just change their skin color and "stop being black", were possible to do so.

I'm writing this comment in English. My native language is different and the vast majority of spoken interactions in my private life isn't in English. English isn't even an official language in my country.

Your argument is crass, but I think you're being needlessly romantic. Unlike skin colour, you can "wear" more than one language and switch between them as appropriate.

In fact, if you spend any time studying linguistics you will quickly learn that even "monolingual" speakers speak different languages depending on the context. We classify these as different registers or sociolects but ultimately the effect is the same:

The language we speak heavily depends on who we are speaking to, not only on who we are.

Whether we can preserve languages that are effectively running out of contexts to be useful in is another question. But that is basically an argument about controlling natural evolution. And that's actually a solved problem: just look at how we preserve other cultural artefacts like art and crafts.

Also, just because a culture is disappearing doesn't mean no new cultures will be created. I'm sure the Romans never worried about their language going away yet the modern "lingua franca" is ultimately a descendent of a bunch of regional varieties of a language closely related to Old Norse. A thousand years from now the worry about the future of AAVE will seem as quaint as the worry about the future of Kentish Old English would seem now (if anyone worried at the time at all).

Heck, the situation of AAVE is actually infinitely better than that of Kentish Old English: there is a wealth of contemporary study into AAVE and thanks to modern technology it is trivial to archive speech samples, even including the spoken word and interviews with native speakers.

If you ignore the politicisation of this issue (because all "race" issues are political in the US, even when they're supposedly about language) the decline of AAVE is no more tragic than the decline of any other regional or social language.

Preserving languages is a solved problem. There is no reason to worry about AAVE beyond ensuring its preservation except for race politics.

In case something weird happens again, this was in reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12030792

No part of this article concerns itself with preservation of AAVE.

Sure, but the comment I was responding to seemed to worry about conserving AAVE because it equated displacing AAVE with genetically eradicating black skin color.

People change their language all the time (which is why the skin color comparison is nonsense to begin with). Ultimately that means some languages are going to be discontinued. Preservation helps preventing these languages (as cultural heritage) from being forgotten.

Saying AAVE speakers shouldn't learn and speak GA is more akin to saying redheads shouldn't should only procreate with other redheads because otherwise redhead culture might go "extinct" (or rather: only survive in the form of occasional mutations).

I'm sorry, but it's like you read my comment and then substituted some other comment in your head to respond to. Once again: no part of this essay is about whether AAVE will be "discontinued". Anyone suggesting that as a live debate on this thread should probably read it more carefully.

Again: I'm not arguing with you or the article. I'm was responding to the comment I originally responded to[0] and I just expanded on my counter-point.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12030792

People are already changing their skin color intentionally.

They have for 1000's of years but it is getting more techy.

They shouldn't be doing it cause it makes the racial majority feel bad?

Some pretty twisted logic if you sit down and think about it.

As the article points out, there is evidence from Norwegian experiments that "[t]eaching children to read first in their own dialects and then gradually introducing the standard language can speed and improve the acquisition of reading skills."

Further, "[i]n Oakland itself... it was found that teachers who condemned AAVE pronunciations [sic] and interpreted them as reading errors got the worst results in teaching AAVE-speaking children to read, while teachers who used AAVE creatively in the classroom got the best results."

I couldn't find evidence in the article that anyone was telling young black Americans that they could talk like "hoodlums" and expect to get ahead in life.

I think I agree with your main point but your use of the word hoodlum is disconcerting. It demonstrates a bias inherant in your position. You are associating criminal behavior with a form of speech. I suspect this association of yours comes primarily from the media you consume.

Perhaps understanding the linguistics will help you and others from automatically having negative connotations about speakers of AAVE.

Are you saying academic linguists should write things they know are false, to fit better with your politics?

Sounds, dare I say, like the very definition of this political correctness thing conservatives are always complaining about.

1. Do African-Americans "talk like hoodlums" because that's how hoodlums talk or is that your image of how hoodlums talk? Overall wondering if words like hoodlum, thug, and ghetto are reserved exclusively for black people.

2. Are you assuming all or most black people speak this way and/or can't speak 'properly' in proper circumstances? Do you draw the same conclusions for the vernacular of (poor) southern whites?

3. '[I]ntegrate', 'culture', and 'Uncle Tom' have real historical significance. Do African-American's simply need to speak the standard white American dialect to 'get ahead in life' or do they need to also act white? Perhaps look white?

In the recent past, not having a real education and not wearing a suit everyday severely limited your economic opportunity. Entrepreneurship in the form of "hacker culture" changed that. I think the same can happen with entrepreneurship in the form of "black culture" or any culture.

Please question assumptions, second-guess terms like hoodlum not to be politically correct but to be accurate, and know history explains a lot about why society is how it is, anthropology does too.

Not all Chinese grow up speaking mandarin, however that is what they get taught in school. Students in Nigeria get taught standard English in school. Parents push for that knowing it can potentially improve their children's outlook.

We know whites who speak non standard English also suffer from job difficulties.

We know middle class immigrants like to get their kids to integrate into their new society by learning their new country's language and being proficient in it. We see this in France, Britain, Japan, etc. Fitting into the mainstream, like it or not, improves life opportunities. I know people like to retain their culture, and that's fine, but actively despising it and then saying the mainstream culture shuns you is unsurprising.

It's like bikers who dress like bikers do as to "enjoy" the the image that brings then complain they get reactions from people or police which affect them negatively, even if they aren't engaging in their aura. It's not exactly the same, but the mechanisms have similarity.

Schools in the United States teach African-Americans standard English. Please keep in mind this article refers to one city, 20 years ago.

African-American parents push for standard English as well.

African-Americans know fitting into mainstream culture improves life opportunities.

African-Americans don't actively (or passively) despise the mainstream culture.

African-Americans do complain about the reactions from people and police which affect them negatively, even when wearing a suit and speaking perfect proper English.

Is it possible black people aren't really different but are treated differently? Why?

Or maybe my reading, travel, and observations have selection bias skewed too positively.

We don't necessarily need to use words like "hoodlums", but in terms of practical advice, this is as sound for African-American vernacular english as it is for Appalachian vernacular English, for the same reason that people in the business world generally talk in business-specific dialects (synergy! alignment!) rather than using the latest Internet memes. A fruitful approach will respect local vernacular usages while still teaching the generic "polished" English language.

The original article addresses this very point on its last section, found on page 55.

Really disappointing that this nonsense is the top comment in the thread.

Please don't post comments like this, but instead flag egregious comments when you see them. To flag a comment, click on its timestamp to go to its page, then click 'flag' at the top. There's a small karma threshold, but you're well over it, so that's what you should have done here.

Why flag it? It's not violating any rule. It's just a political opinion he disagrees with. This is the purpose of the downvote.

I see this is your first time reading anything on HN regarding Black people. Anti-Black shit that manages to avoid outright slurs is a surefire path to internet points.

Not that I disagree with you, but is this so much different than the Right wanting to teach their children about a 6000 year old earth and "Creatiom Science"?

Full integration does not require that you -only- be able to speak standardish english. I think the key of studying and destigmatizing AAVE is to allow the very type of integration that you want. By raising AAVE to the standard of a "real" language/dialect, instead of just calling it "broken english" (thus casting the speaker as broken in someway), you now open the door to the speaker being bilingual - something that is both clearly attainable, and perhaps in many ways possibly beneficial.

Calling is broken generates defensive attitudes that will likely impede any actual process of integration.

This. That's the most important point. There's been studies that shows that using the children's native dialect to teach reading results in faster progress. Making it clear that Standard English is a different language makes integration much easier.

This is similar to kids learning Mandarin in China, they are taught that Mandarin is a different language than their dialect not that they speak broken Chinese, so they learn Mandarin and are eventually able to use it in business/formal situations.

You seem to simultaneously acknowledge that AAVE is a valid dialect, while also claiming that those who speak it "talk like hoodlums". You're a racist, and you're also wrong based on the available evidence from educators that have experimented with accepting AAVE in the classroom.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com